Britain's largest single-site university with a proud history of achievement and an ambitious agenda for the future.

The university was named Sunday Times University of the Year in 2006 after winning the inaugural Times Higher Education Supplement University of the Year prize in 2005. According to The Sunday Times, "Manchester has a formidable reputation spanning most disciplines, but most notably in the life sciences, engineering, humanities, economics, sociology and the social sciences".

In 2007/08 it had over 40,000 students studying 500 academic programmes and more than 10,000 staff, making it the largest single-site university in the United Kingdom. More students try to gain entry to the University of Manchester than any other university in the country, with more than 60,000 applications for undergraduate courses alone. In 2007 the University had an annual income of £637 million.

In the first national assessment of higher education research since the university’s founding, the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, the University of Manchester came 3rd in terms of research power after Cambridge and Oxford and 8th for grade point average quality when including specialist institutions.